"What happened to supporting local? Subway, KFC, Wendy's, DQ, Denny's and now Starbucks... Come on guys, let's stop trying to be a mini-America and be Trinidad and Tobago.
I like Wendy's and KFC as well eh and I LOVE DQ but come nah man, there's such a thing as too much. We're putting our local food industry out of business man, I don't know if its just me but I find it's harder to get some good creole food than it is to get something from one of these imported franchises. #supportlocal #disappointed #I4TT" I ended my rant on facebook there but I had so much more to say and so many more franchises to list (fear not, I won't list them).
Recently some friends and I made a trip from Port of Spain to Grand Riviere (close to Toco I've attached a map to give an idea of the expedition). I've made this trip more times than I can count with my family and when I was younger we would stop for home-made ice-cream on the way back home, so when one of my friends suggested we stop for ice-cream on the way back to Port of Spain I got really excited. We stopped at a little parlour and I placed my order with the middle-aged woman behind the counter and to my dismay when I received the ice-cream it was Flavorite (a local brand of ice-cream). While it's good that it was a local brand as opposed to a foreign brand it highlighted to me how major companies are putting little shops out of business. Whereas before it was easy to stop and get home-made ice-cream it is no longer economical for the small businesses to produce its own specially product due to competition from large companies. While in this case the money is still staying in T&T (though getting one family or a few families richer and richer) a good percentage of money that foreign franchises make goes abroad i.e. OUT OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO!! Franchises like Starbucks cannot and will not help our local economy! We already have a booming coffee shop (Rituals) so why import a coffee shop?? Why import any brand for that matter?
I believe that we can have our own franchises that are just as good as any foreign franchise if we work at it. Let's start being a nation that cares about its economic future and thinks ahead instead of two steps in front of us (which is Starbucks). The attraction in these chains is the "nice food" we see on tv (the root of the problem) but we can produce wonderful consumables. The franchises we are bringing in hurt the ladies in the parlours the most, it hurts the small man, the person that lives day to day and it ultimately hurts us ALL.
